I could hear crashes behind me as those things followed me. I was afraid at any moment Stanley or I would be taken down and that would be it. I had another bottle of alcohol ready, but there was no time to make it into another weapon. My head whipped back and forth as I tried to come up with some way for us to get out of this predicament.

I pulled down aisles as we ran to buy us some time, and looked back to see the monsters had stopped and were just watching us go deeper. It was as if we had passed some sort of threshold, and they weren't willing to go any further. No time to dwell on it. We couldn't guarantee they wouldn't change their minds if we stayed. With the spiders at the front door, our best bet was to either find something to kill them with, or make our way to the back door of the center and exit that way.

The stillness in the loading dock of the store was extremely off putting. Nothing looked like it had been touched, no shelves were out of place, not boxes on the floor, and everything was organized neatly. As we looked around, there was a clattering sound, followed by a voice in the dimly lit space. The voice was soft, with a slight growl on the end of every word, and I could barely make out what it was saying, except for the last, which was loud enough that it echoed throughout the stocked shelves of the dock.

"No no no no! Stay in your places! Everything must have its place, if you leave then you disrupt my beautiful home, my collection. I feed you enough to survive pretties, stay where you are and be appreciative!"

I waved to Stanley to back away slowly towards the back door. It seemed we had stumbled into something just as dangerous as the spiders here. It hadn't sounded entirely like a parasite, the group at the entrance had talked by forming vocal cords, and their speech was slightly stilted, but it wasn't completely human either. Could we have found another person that had the same thing happen to them as Stanley? I doubted it, but considering each parasite was using its hosts brain matter, what would happen if it had taken over someone with heavy OCD?

As we backed away, Stanley bumped into one of the shelves. All of a sudden, a few cases started shaking and and clattering.

"Who's there?!! Is there a little mouse messing with my collection? Or are my pretties getting rowdy again? Don't make me get out the punshiment stick sweetlings." I grabbed Stanley and pulled him behind one of the shelves, putting my finger to my lips to get him to stay quiet. A lumbering form waddled around the corner. In the dim light the thing towered at what looked to be eight or nine feet tall. And it was corpulent, so much so that it struggled to make its way through the aisles easily. It walked up to the shaking boxes and slammed on them with the back of a long branch it was wielding like a club. It was hard to make out, but there appeared to be bent nails studded across the top.

"I wish my collection would just stay quiet and in their place.... but they are so interesting when alive. There needs to be a way to keep them interesting that won't need me to kill them. Maybe I should expand? More pretties would mean I could find some that will be quiet. The sisters would make a pretty center piece, but they are so fast I can't aquire them. Ohhhh but they would look so beautiful! My brethren make such exquisite shapes after they infect one of the humans." A grumble came from the beast as it clutched its stomach. "Ah, the eternal hunger returns..... perhaps this time I can take pieces from my collection instead of losing a full one. A bit of muscle here, some fat there, maybe a finger for desert. They will grow most of it back, and no one would notice a tiny piece missing from my beautiful collection"

While it was distracted would be our best chance to escape. We slithered our way from behind the shelf and tiptoed towards the door. The creature began to lumber again, walking directly where we were trying to go as I pulled Stanley behind another shelf. He grabbed my arm, pointing at the boxes and then the door, shaking his head. He didn't want to leave anyone behind, but those people were already dead. We had no idea which ones were parasites and which were still okay, and it was a risk to even try. Unfortunately, since the beast, whom I nicknamed the Collector, was in front of the door admiring a shiny metal cleaver. It would be impossible to sneak past him.

We wouldn't be able to get out the front or the back by sneaking, so our only option was to try and distract the Collector long enough to run out the door. It seemed to care about its "collection", going so far as to straighten each box until it was perfectly aligned with the others. If we messed with the arrangement slightly and made some small amount of noise, we could use the beasts idiosyncrasies against it. It still required Stanley and I to be on the same page, which given his vehemence in insisting we save them, did not bode well for me. Stanley was my ticket to winning this mission, and jeopardizing it by getting him killed would only make my job harder later. At least if I helped him, we could still use the escaped prisoners as a distraction. Against my better judgement, I nodded at Stanley, and he motioned to me to follow him, presumably somewhere out of earshot of the monster.